Rabbit ears, wigs galore, monkey head or rejuvenating effects… If you have a smartphone, you have inevitably come face to face with an image generated by Snapchat, the very popular application for exchanging photos and videos at 18 .1 million French daily users. But for this March 8, she has a completely different surprise in store for you. To celebrate International Women’s Rights Day, she is virtually raising eight statues, in eight cities in France, to heroines who had not yet had this honor.
Monuments that will simply appear, provided you have downloaded the application, by pointing your smartphone at a statue… Dedicated to a man. In Paris, for example, go to the Champs-Élysées roundabout where General de Gaulle’s stands. On your screen, Simone Veil on her pedestal is displayed in augmented reality, in a similar style and a few meters from the liberator of the capital. You can go around it and watch passers-by wander past, like a real one… An experience, as impressive as it is fun, which is completed by a presentation sheet on the woman who got the law passed for abortion (voluntary interruption of pregnancy).
At the origin of this operation, which continues after March 8, an observation. “Studies show that illustrious women are very poorly represented in the public space, with less than 10% of statues. To promote parity, we wanted to give them more space. We therefore imagined this silent dialogue with male statues, with which they maintain a link: either because they are contemporary or because they practiced in the same field”, summarizes Antoine Gilbert, director of strategies at AR Studio. , created by Snapchat to develop augmented reality.
A shift towards other uses of the application
In Lyon, for example, Simone de Beauvoir rubs shoulders with Antoine de Saint-Exupéry while Joséphine Baker takes her place near Jean Moulin in Metz. But other of these women are less known to the general public, such as Hubertine Auclert, journalist and feminist activist who joins Léon Trulin, hero of the First World War. “It also makes it possible to discover personalities who marked their time but who, for some, are a little forgotten. They were chosen from us by a female college,” continues Antoine Gilbert.
This “March 8, 8 women, 8 cities” is part of a more global approach of Snapchat, a shift towards other uses of the application. “We are the leader in augmented reality but with a use that has been mainly, until now, focused on entertainment. We are beginning, in particular with the creation of the Studio 7 months ago, an evolution towards the useful”, deciphers Artiné Mackertichian, head of communication at Snap.
“For example, we collaborated with the Red Cross to enable people to learn life-saving gestures. In the field of culture, we worked this winter with the Center Pompidou and the artist Christian Marclay to create a work on the facade of Beaubourg. In addition to bunny ears, there are millions of other possible uses for augmented reality. »